


A Room With a Crappy View

by Silky_Octopus



Category: Alien Quadrilogy (Movies), Aliens Series
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21831826
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silky_Octopus/pseuds/Silky_Octopus
Summary: This is/was a Yuletide 2019 treat for anr, who grabbed my attention with her Yuletide letter on Dreamwidth:Prompt suggestions:- "Alien3" fix-it fic: the egg is still on board but Ripley and Hicks (and Newt) are able to wake before the alien causes the fire...- Ripley refuses to go back to LV426; Hicks (and some of the others?) survive the mission somehow; the alien threat stretches across the stars to Earth. How do these changes change nothing at all?My favourite movie of all time. The end.Seriously. I love everything about this movie. I love that Ripley is strong and broken and unrelenting. I love that she has PTSD and smokes constantly and is too busy and afraid to sleep. I love that she sees danger and terror everywhere, and that it's real, which is why she will use anything she can find or learn to defend herself and hers. And I love that Hicks is her perfect match, that he is exactly the same, and that he sees all her strengths and faults and never doubts her for a second.
Relationships: Dwayne Hicks/Ellen Ripley
Comments: 15
Kudos: 67
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	A Room With a Crappy View

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anr/gifts).



Air.

That familiar choking sensation, as lungs unused to the effort frantically tried to pull breath in, throat working, mouth almost frantically biting at the air, waiting for that first, desperate wheeze.

What if it was in her lungs, and that was why she couldn’t breathe?

Hands clawing at whatever was holding her down, she launched herself upwards, making it no further than perhaps halfway up to a sitting position before something held her back. Acid burned in her veins as she fought desperately…

… and then that first, sweet breath was pouring into her lungs, rushing in to leave them so full it hurt to try and inhale any further, and yet for a few seconds she kept trying anyway.

And then another breath.

And another.

The noises around her started to make sense as her mind started to calm, just a little. “… going to hurt yourself. Try and be calm. Try and breathe. If you keep struggling, you’re going to hurt yourself…”

The voice was light, and female, and somewhere nearby. Lungs working hard, she fell backwards onto something soft, trying to slow her breathing down. “Where the fuck am I?” Her voice sounded raw to her ears, haggard with lack of use, and loud, so loud.

“I’m going to clean your eyes so you can open them. Hold still, alright?” The voice went quiet until she nodded, and it was then replaced with the feeling of something warm dabbing and rubbing at her eyelids.

“I said, where the fuck am I?” Her voice didn’t sound any better, but there was perhaps slightly less of an edge of hysteria to it. When the sensation on her eyes stopped, she forced them open, ignoring the brief stinging pain and the effort it took.

The world was white – white, and luminous, and hazy. Was it water in her eyes, or water from her eyes? A blur started to resolve itself somewhere to her left, blue and brown and black. She wanted to shove away when something – a hand? – landed on her shoulder, but instead made herself lie still.

“You’re at Fort Raleigh, at Beta-Sirius Six. This is a military station, on the route between…” She shoved the hand on her shoulder away, squinting until the figure became almost clear enough to focus on; a woman, dark-skinned and dark-haired, wearing something blue. Overalls? Some kind of fatigues?

“I set the course for Earth. I know I set the course for Earth.” She’d been asleep. They’d all been asleep. She remembered closing Dwayne’s tube down while he dozed in a narcotic haze. Bishop, sealed up in a plastic bag like some twisted and broken toy.

Newt.

The woman was trying to avoid scowling at her, although she wasn’t doing a particularly good job of it. Her eyes were clearing, although they still stung. Ripley. Her name was Ellen Ripley. “The Sulaco was intercepted nine days into your flight, I’m told. It was towed here, for assessment and recovery. You’ve been in cryosleep for at least twenty-seven days, while we cleaned your system out and treated you. Now, are you going to cooperate, so I can relax the restraints and tell the big scary marine you’re not a problem, or do I have to sedate you and come back tomorrow with bigger guards?”

She pushed herself up to a sitting position, starting to pay attention to all the sensations fighting for her attention. The chill in the air. The faint tang of mould that went with recycled air in sealed environmental systems. The ache in muscles that hadn’t been exercised enough. The urge to throw up that went with being around idiots.

“Where are the others?” She wanted a smoke, she realised. Something that she could control, that would settle her hands. And her brain. When the other woman didn’t respond, Ellen stared at her, and spoke again, deliberately, slowly. “I said, where are the others? There were four of us aboard the Sulaco.”

The woman – there was a name tape above her left blouse pocket, she realised – the woman, whose name was apparently Purnell, shook her head slightly, then visibly stopped herself. “Your android is in one of the workshops, where I think they’re trying to work out what you did to it. The little girl, Rebecca, was dispatched on the packet ship to the Rigil Kentarus system three days ago…”

Ellen didn’t realise she was trying to pull herself out of the bed until someone else was trying to push her back onto it, someone taller and considerably bulkier, who’d been standing behind her. “I need you to calm down, Ms Ripley.” The woman – Purnell – was being so calm that Ellen wanted to brain her with something. “Rebecca is fine. She has grandparents on Rigil Kentarus, and was dispatched to stay with them in line with the laws on the protection of minors.”

She wanted to hurt Purnell, hurt whoever was behind her, hurt all of them. They’d sent her away. And yet, Purnell was still talking. “If you complete your rehabilitation, there’s no reason you can’t leave for the same place, but we need to be sure of the state of your health, and at the moment, you look like you’re on the verge of a psychotic break.”

She made herself still. She couldn’t make herself calm, but she could make herself still. “I’m fine, and I want to leave. Where are my clothes?” She could throw her head back, and make whoever was holding her regret it…

Purnell stared at her for … half a minute, perhaps? Enough time that Ellen tilted her head to one side and tried to force the appearance of calm. She couldn’t do anything locked in this room.

“You’ll be provided with clothes when you’re fit to leave. What you were wearing was sent to decontamination after the quarantine process, that’s SOP.” Purnell made a slight gesture, and the pressure on Ellen’s arms relaxed as whoever it was behind her stepped back. 

Something Purnell had said before finally registered. "Why did I need three weeks of treatment after just nine days of cryosleep?" Shipboard cryosleep tubes were designed specifically to get you up and running in minutes, even if it felt like you had a three-day hangover.

She was close enough to see Purnell's jaw clench and unclench before the medic responded, and that brief pause was enough to set her pulse hammering again. "The chemical mix for the tubes was out of balance. The paralytic in the mix was set to too high a level, and we had to clear it out of your system and make sure your muscles would still work before we woke you up. And we were ordered to do a full decontamination run and workup on you, which takes time while the blood and bone marrow samples are analysed."

Purnell looked away from her, moving to annotate something using a white stylus on the tablet hanging from the end of the bed. “For now, you need to rest. If you can show that you’re not unduly agitated, there’s a visitor waiting to see you.”

Ellen’s eyes snapped to where the door was set, taking in the lack of a handle, the panel by the door with the red light on it. She’d seen them cutting through those with hand-held welding torches, desperately trying to cut in time…

“I’m calm. You can leave.” There was a snort from behind her, and Purnell looked as if she didn’t believe a word Ellen was saying. The figure behind her – some large man in what looked like an orderly’s robes – moved into her sight and on towards the door, holding an ID from around his neck up against the red light.

Ellen heard the clunk of something moving as the light blinked green. “I said you can leave. I’m sure you and Mighty Mouse there have business to attend to somewhere else.” She didn’t even bother looking at Purnell. Bishop was in some lab or workshop somewhere. Rebecca was… somewhere else. And then there was…

His left arm was swathed in some kind of semi-translucent gauze from wrist to shoulder, and a similar patch covered the right side of his face from his hairline down to his chin. From what she could see, the skin underneath was an odd shade, but he was walking, and he had one arm inside a camouflage-pattern jacket while the other hung loose, but it was definitely him.

“I’m the one who’s meant to sleep through anything, Ellen.” The side of his mouth she could see twisted in a slight, careful grin.

~*~*~*~*~*~

He came back. He hadn’t been able to stay long the first time; a doctor had appeared, dressed in a white coat over the same kind of fatigues Purnell had been wearing, and had ordered him to leave the room before she’d done more than confirm that he was alive and walking. But she’d cooperated with the tests and not killed anyone and had eaten the food that tasted like wallpaper paste coated with dehydrated gravy, and he’d come back.

“You heard they sent Newt away?” She couldn’t remember if she’d asked before, but she asked again anyway, as he sat in a chair that seemed to be polished steel tubes and a flexible plastic seat and back… as artificial as everything else. Maybe she should’ve asked how he was doing, but he was alive and moving around and he knew what they’d been through – what she’d been through – to get Newt back.

He nodded, slowly. “Yeah. I asked when I woke up. They didn’t even wake her up. Kept her in the sleeper tank, checked her out, shipped her off. It’s you and me they wanted here, walking around.” She could see where the hair along his left temple had been shaved short, around the edge of where the bandage was taped in place.

She fought down a brief wave of panic. Who knew where Newt was? She’d made promises, and she had to keep them this time. She had to get out of this bed, go and …

She had to be calm. “I’d kill for a cigarette.” She smiled, and guessed it probably looked bitter. “Maybe I should give them up, before they ship me off to prison.” After the shit she’d been through over the Nostromo, it would definitely be prison this time.

“I don’t think you’re so good at giving up.” He didn’t stop looking at her, somehow sitting almost completely still, his eyes on her face whenever she looked at him. “And you’re not the surviving senior marine from what was a military mission, whatever Burke said about it.”

Burke was dead. Apone was dead. They were all dead.

Not her, though. And not Hicks. Dwayne.

“Does that… hurt?” She gestured with her hand towards his arm. She’d done the best she could, with what he’d told her, and Bishop, but…

He hesitated for a few seconds, then shook his head slightly. “It itches. They did… something… to the nerves, before the skin graft. Apparently, I won’t feel much of anything under the grafts for the next four to six weeks. That’s why they woke me up early. Had to make sure the skin they took from my ass and force-grew for the grafts had taken.”

She nodded, paused. “Are you ok?”

“I should be asking you that.” He shifted in his seat, looking uncomfortable. “They put me in a quarter. Officer country, I think. Concerned about putting me into one of the lower rank dorms. They say I’m clear of anything, but I guess they don’t want me near anyone else for a while. It’s… well, it’s got a crappy view of the side of the main loading dock, and one hatch.”

They’d not stopped to think, after… after the loading bay. She’d patched him up, programmed the navigation computer, put them all in tubes, all without stopping to think. Without stopping to feel much of anything. And for him…

“How much have they asked you about what happened?” She could remember vividly what it was like after the Nostromo. The times where it had been difficult to tell if she was getting counselling or being interrogated. She’d ended up treating every conversation as if it were the latter.

He reached up, as if he was going to scratch the bandaged side of his face, and then stopped himself. “A lot. Last time was yesterday. Military police, military intelligence, people who claim they’re Weyland-Yutani. Even some woman who claimed to be an insurance claim investigator. Every decision I made – we made – backwards and forwards. Confirmation of what happened to everyone in my squad. Questions about Gorman’s decisions. Questions about Burke’s actions.” He leaned forward, staring at her. “How about you?”

She shook her head. “Not a damn thing.”

They sat quietly for several minutes. Stillness seemed to suit him, but her mind kept racing around in circles, going back and forth over everything they could ask, every answer she could give, and testing the absence of Newt in her mind like the spot for a missing tooth, something that would ache whenever she touched it but which she couldn’t stop poking.

Neither of them looked around when the door opened; in some way, this small space was theirs… theirs, and the ghosts of everyone dead.

The doctor who appeared busied himself with noting down various figures from the monitoring tablet hanging at the end of her bed, before nodding to himself. “You’re doing well, Ms Ripley. In a day or two, we’ll be able to release you, and I’m sure that central will have a quarter available for…”

“I’ve already got a quarter.” She was looking at Dwayne, and he was looking right back. “It’s got a shitty view of the main loading dock.”

~*~*~*~*~*~

Three nights, and one or both of them had woken up gasping in the middle of each night, fighting things in their sleep that had been stalking them through the damp, metallic remains of a dead colony. Three days of shitty sleep and cigarettes and waiting for something to happen. Hicks should’ve been posted, either to a hospital or a squad or something. She should’ve been under investigation, getting interrogated six ways from Sunday, company drones and military intelligence and maybe the damn pilots guild, all wanting to know about the second massacre to strike a ship she was crewing, but instead they were being left alone.

The doctor had insisted on her coming in for a basic check each morning, which didn’t seem right to her, but Dwayne went as well, getting bandages checked, his burns sprayed and dressed. The burned holes in his flesh were gone, the red and black char replaced with new skin and faint pink ridging where all the seams fell. She didn’t look away when his bandages were dressed, and he didn’t say a thing when she chain-smoked in silence for an hour.

He’d been incoherent when he first woke up; she’d been awake, unable to sleep, watching him and debating whether to wake him up or not. He’d lurched out of bed, saying something that she thought was “Where’s Wierzbowski?” but he denied being able to remember anything, even as his right hand was groping around for something… probably a weapon.

On the fourth day, she decided that they had to do something other than wait. So, she suggested that they go and find out what was going on with Bishop, which raised the question of where the workshop was that he was supposed to be in, or how to get there.

Hicks took a direct approach; he hadn’t been given the computer access that someone posted to the station would’ve been, but he was still a corporal, and rank still had its uses when dealing with people.

As an area assessed as having a significant chance of some kind of industrial accident, the workshops were located on the lower levels of the station, beyond the cargo decks. Few if any of the personnel on the station seemed to be wearing body armour of any kind; there were armed guards on most levels, but also a fair number of civilian personnel. From what Ellen could work out, it looked like this was a transit facility, with cargo moving in and out on a regular basis. She could’ve learned more if she’d been able to access one of the cargo bays, but electronic passes controlled almost everything, and she conspicuously didn’t have one.

The workshop was another sealed door, but without an obvious guard. Hicks took a simple approach to getting in; he stepped up and hammered on the door with his right hand until someone opened it, and when they opened it, he stalked in like he owned the place. The two people inside were too busy watching him to pay much attention to her walking in behind him.

The room smelled like hot metal, despite the ventilation units she could hear whirring away. She’d not really ventured into Brett and Parker’s space on the Nostromo, but she knew enough to recognise metal presses, lathes and other fabrication machinery. This didn’t look like an electronics lab, and it certainly didn’t look sterile enough for delicate electronic repairs.

“Hicks!” Her voice cut through the arguments of the two machinists, and he was at her elbow a couple of seconds later, the two techs following and looking flustered.

Bishop was there. Inactive, but there. Stretched out on a workbench, the damaged tubing and components that made up his insides linked and sealed somehow, but still missing his legs. An access port in the side of his head had been left open, the titanium/ceramic structure of his skull exposed, revealed circuitry and access ports. Another port in the crook of his left elbow was also open, a disturbing intrusion into flesh that otherwise looked human, and he was completely motionless.

As she moved to touch him, one of the techs started stepping forward, but Hicks blocked his path with his right arm, and whoever the techs were, neither of them looked ready to force their way through yet.

Some rummaging in the compartments built into the sides of the workbench revealed various electronic handsets, several of which she recognised, all of them the chunky, metallic olive-green of military issue hardware. Grabbing a couple of lengths of cable, she spent a few seconds working out likely ports in Bishop to plug them into before connecting the cables to the reader and firing it up.

It was lucky that most of these units were bought in from whatever source happened to win the supply contract every few years; that meant that however they looked, the routine commands had to be standardised, to keep the training simple.

“Look at this.” He stepped forward, moving past the techs, who’d gone silent while she worked, and looked down at the scrolling display. He recognised some of what she was doing; pulling up copies of Bishop’s internal logs, trying to work out when he was last active.

“This was… Hudson’s thing. I was more about getting him to where the computers were.” Columns of text flowed past in silent streams, slowing as Ripley got closer to what she was looking for. He looked at the techs, who seemed almost adrift. “Why is he in here? I don’t see any repair frames.”

“Recycling.” The tech flinched when Hicks looked at him, but kept talking anyway. “Standard policy with androids this badly damaged. It’s cheaper for companies to replace them from new than ship out parts for repairs.”

“They copied his memory files, ran a diagnostic, and waited about a week, according to this.” Ripley pulled the cables free, coiling them around the reader. “We’re taking him with us. If anyone complains… refer them to Doctor Purnell and tell them he’s a therapy aid.”

Without waiting for anyone to have time to object, she started wrapping him up in some kind of plastic sheeting.

“You heard her. We’ll also need a charging unit. I’ll even sign the loan paperwork, so you can say you were following orders.” Whatever expression he was wearing, Hicks sent one of the techs scurrying away, to return a few moments later with an A5-sized book of forms, complete with carbon paper between several of the tissue-thin pages.

As Ripley finished wrapping Bishop up – what was left of him – and hauled him up onto her back like a sack of coal, Hicks signed the paperwork and shoved a thin copy into a pocket. Snatching up the compact charging unit with his good hand, he followed her out through the hatch, silently flanking her.

“You know this is nuts, right? Sooner or later, someone’s going to come looking for him.” Walking side by side, they owned the corridor; anyone who met them would have to move aside, but there wasn’t that much foot traffic on the lower levels.

She didn’t stop walking, but she did look at him, hands knotted close to her chin and white-knuckled with the effort of carrying the extra weight. “He waited for us.”

Not just waited. He’d crawled through service tunnels, piloted ships, patched up injuries.

“Right.”

~*~*~*~*~*~

It didn’t feel right to leave him hanging from a clothes hook – even assuming there was one in the room that would take the weight – and there wasn’t exactly a lot of space to begin with, so Ellen had sat him up in one of the two armchairs. She could sit in the other chair, tilt her head back and feel the back of her head resting against the top of the chair, but Bishop’s head was at least half a foot lower down. The trailing tubes and the absence of legs made him look wrong, made her brain itch, so a grey, service-issue blanket that felt about as comfortable as a hair shirt went across the arms of the chair, covering where his legs should’ve been.

It took hours to charge him from the portable charging unit; whatever the station personnel had done before, they hadn’t bothered charging his internal batteries, although they had done enough patching and sealing to stop his mechanical organs seizing from lack of fluids. While she moved to sit on the narrow bed and smoked cigarettes, Hicks alternated between sitting in the other chair, and pacing slowly around the room, carefully flexing his injured arm, testing to see if the skin grafts still pulled painfully tight.

“It doesn’t feel right.” He hadn’t spoken much since they got back, and nor had she. She didn’t know how long it would take her to feel relaxed anywhere again for more than moments at a time; she kept expecting the lighting to switch to a sullen, burnt red, and warning klaxons to sound. “Bishop’s sent to recycling, I’m interrogated every day for days, and everyone’s treating you like a bad rash. It doesn’t make any god-damned sense.”

She rose up from her seat, accidentally dropping ash on the floor from the cigarette that’d burned out without her noticing. Flicking the stub into the improvised ashtray she’d been using, she walked over to intercept Hicks as he turned back for another lap of the room, stopping him by putting her hand on the right side of his chest. “Somebody is going to be looking for us. You said the military would send reinforcements after seventeen days without a report, and you can bet that Burke’s bosses at Weyland-Yutani are going to want to know what happened to their colony – and their precious experiment. If we haven’t already been picked up…”

“… It’s because either they don’t know about us, or someone’s stopping them from knowing about us. And if we’re on a military station, then it’s probably someone in the military.” He’d evidently been thinking along the same lines as her. Was he looking to her to know what to do? 

“We’ll know more after Bishop comes online. They woke him up, and if we know why, we’ll know more about what’s going on.” Staring at him from a few inches away, she could feel the tension in him through her hand, and for a few seconds, he simply stared back.

Then, he relaxed a little. Just a little. “Right.” A crooked smile appeared, briefly. “It can’t be any worse than what we left behind, right?” Despite the light tone, she felt the faint shiver that ran through him, like a chill.

“Right.” She’d done the mandatory psychological evaluations called for by the company, back when she first woke up after the Nostromo, even though she knew that was more for their benefit than hers. “Every time they questioned you, I bet they questioned every decision you made, and when you made it, because that’s what they do.”

She saw the recognition in his eyes as she spoke. “You’re military. You know people die, and you did more than anyone to keep your people alive.” She paused, taking a deep breath. “You listened to me about how dangerous they were, but none of us realised just how fucking clever they are. And how much shit we had for luck. So just…” She didn’t have the right words. This wasn’t what she did.

“Right.” He cut her off, then spoke again, more softly. “Right.”

~*~*~*~*~*~

“Hello, Ripley. It’s been a little while.” Bishop’s face, inset with heavy lines, did its best to smile at her. He looked around at the quarter, a careful sweep around as much of the room as he could manage without levering himself out of the chair. “I see that they haven’t replaced my legs.”

“No, they haven’t.” She reached up to remove the charging cables, then hesitated. He nodded at her, reaching up to disconnect the cable running into his head, before handing it over to her as she removed the cable from his other arm. Hicks had already reached down to disconnect the cables from the charging unit, coiling them neatly as Ripley handed them over.

“This is an unusual environment for us to be in. I checked your navigation instructions as you requested before the Sulaco initiated her gravity drive, and your calculations matched mine. My internal chronometer states that we haven’t been in transit sufficiently long enough to reach any facilities in Earth orbit. May I ask where we are?” His voice was as calm as it had ever been; she remembered speculating once that he may have been deliberately created to sound calming and sympathetic. Ash had been able to do something similar.

Perhaps he was looking to test his own records? “We’re on some station named Fort Raleigh. They say that the Sulaco was intercepted partway through the run, that we were removed for treatment.” Bishop nodded at her words, as if she was making sense to him.

“So, we were collected and brought here. Presumably, they accessed the Sulaco’s records, in addition to my own, which show my internal archives have been accessed and duplicated.” He looked down at the blanket covering where his legs had been. “The fact that I’ve not been repaired suggests that my value to the military and to the company has been found lacking, beyond any information they acquired from my system.” He sounded oddly unphased by this particular revelation.

“We pulled you out a workshop, where you were scheduled for recycling.” Hicks’ voice was soft. He glanced across at her. “She pulled you out of a workshop. I carried things.” He leaned forward, looking intent. “Do you remember being interrogated?”

Bishop shook his head. “My internal records indicate that I was brought online, but I have no memory of the event. Technical staff employed by the company have various tools to allow them to remove and edit information logs from models like me, to help us remain employable.” If he were human, his expression, his tone, might perhaps have been described as sardonic. “It would appear that the military no longer require my services.”

“Welcome to the rejects.” She almost smiled. Almost. “So, they copied your files and woke you up, but then deleted your memory of it. The military have asked Dwayne an endless round of questions, and I’ve been ignored like three-day-dead fish. And Newt… Newt’s apparently on a ship to stay with some relatives, without being woken up at all.”

“And you suspect that there are ulterior motives in play.” That got a snort from Hicks. “What are your intentions?”

Both Hicks and Bishop were looking at her, she realised. “We think that someone may be keeping information on us away from… well, probably Weyland-Yutani, or maybe the military, or both, but something isn’t right. Can you tell us what?”

Bishop looked contemplative and didn’t speak for perhaps a minute. Given how artificial his brain was, that must have been something akin to an eternity for him. “It would appear that I still have access to the basic company infrastructure. This facility is one of those where Weyland-Yutani have the contract for facilities maintenance, and they are currently paying to rent a sector of this installation for their own use.”

“So, you can access their network?” Hicks had a focused, intent look to him; it looked better on him than walking up and down, fretting. “Can you tell us why they intercepted the Sulaco? Confirm what we’ve been told?”

Bishop went still again, before looking at them both. “It would be easier if you could connect me to the system via a hard-line, as my wireless capabilities appear to be… impaired.” He offered his arm to Ripley, who began unspooling one of the coiled cables again. “This may take me a little while.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?” She felt a tinge of worry for him, even though it didn’t make a lot of sense. “I mean, we need to know… want to know… what’s going on, but I thought you might… remember something.” She was hesitating, one end of the cable hooked into his arm, the other in her hand, near one of the general access ports for the room.

“I’m an artificial person. I don’t have wants, as you understand them. I am also a part of the Sulaco’s crew, and Corporal Hicks is the senior ranking member of the military crew, so I’m obliged to follow his instructions, unless it conflicts my core directives. Although I may run into issues if I’m given an order by the company system that overrides the terms of my contract to the military.” He smiled. For some reason, it made him look somehow cadaverous and almost jaunty, all at the same time. “And from a practical point of view, they assigned me to recycling, which means that they feel my net worth is less than the cost of my components, so I have nothing to lose.”

Sometimes he was entirely too human.

~*~*~*~*~*~

He was silent for so long that Hicks ended up making food, something edible that he pulled together from dehydrated food packs. It was hot, and brown, and tasted vaguely of tomatoes and spices, but she watched his hands move – both of them – as he prepared things. For some reason, he added a lot of some kind of hot sauce to the mix. “It might be better with cornbread” he said quietly, as he handed her bowl across.

“It can’t be that bad”, she’d responded, and then they’d eaten in silence, alternately looking at Bishop and each other. It was easier, though. Even if they weren’t doing something, Bishop was, and that took the feeling of enforced idleness away.

When Bishop resurfaced, the change from stillness to movement was sudden enough to make her jump. While he continued to blink as if he were human, he didn’t breathe, and never suffered from muscle cramps or anything similar.

“I don’t have any access to the military network on the station, although I did try. Maybe if I was one of the artificial people assigned to this station, I would have. I do have some access to the Weyland-Yutani network, though. I can confirm that various queries were made regarding Rebecca, her citizenship records, medical records, family records… enough to confirm that she does have relatives in another system, and that she was considered to be in reasonable health when she left the station. As the child of company employees, Weyland-Yutani had the right to administer her medical treatment, but they decided that it would be simpler to treat her for malnutrition at the other end, rather than waking her up and taking on a process that would last several weeks here. The healthcare costs are lower on established colony worlds, while treatment on this station would include charges to reflect the cost of maintaining the facilities here.” He was as calm and matter-of-fact as he’d ever been. For a moment, she felt irrationally angry towards him, as if he were the company, or an extension of them. Someone responsible for sending Newt away, of treating her like a problem instead of a child. Or as much of a child as she could be, with everything she’d seen.

Bishop was watching her, and she could practically imagine the checklist in his head. A crewmember is acting in an emotionally unstable way. Here are the methods for calming the situation down, and here are the standard lines to take when encouraging that employee to seek medical attention. “I apologise if I have upset you. The company is responsible for the health of its employees and their direct dependents, but considers the cost effectiveness of its options when assigning treatment.”

“It’s not your fault.” She didn’t believe herself either, but she’d work on it. Bishop had waited for them, and brought them out.

“You weren’t claimed by the company. You were woken up later than Corporal Hicks because the company staff here queried your employment status, determined that you were included on the Sulaco as an independent, self-employed private contractor, and argued that the military should be responsible for your healthcare costs.” Somehow, she wasn’t even surprised. She hadn’t asked about the terms and conditions under which she’d been sent to LV-426; they’d said she could have her licence back, and getting that back meant something. Stopping what happened to Dallas and the others happening to someone else maybe mattered more.

Stopping the dreams had meant everything.

She waved a hand, cutting Bishop off. “My status doesn’t matter. What else did you find?” There had to be something more, something that would at least begin to explain what was going on.

Bishop tilted his head at her gesture, following her hand with his eyes like a cat, before continuing to speak. “There are a number of files that are encrypted and which I don’t have access to. An artificial person assigned to the station may have more. However, I can offer a … supposition. Charging records for the electric trolleys indicate that multiple containers were removed from the Sulaco. It took some time, but by matching the usage of the trolleys set to recharging, and the items checked into the station, I believe that there is a load uncounted for. There is a single loading trolley that performed a single round trip from a Weyland-Yutani-controlled location to the Sulaco and back again. While the individual journeys are not logged, the company has installed monitoring devices on the charge pads located throughout the station to track the amount of use each trolley receives, with a view to supplying and maintaining fewer trolleys to reduce their expenses.”

He looked faintly surprised when Hicks started laughing softly. She shot Dwayne a look, not sure if she should be annoyed or not. He shook his head after a few seconds before replying. “Weyland-Yutani are all about providing ‘more efficient services’ on every station I’ve ever seen them on. Most of which mean taking things away and working what’s left to death. Working out what they’re up to using their own time and motion scanners? Oh, that’s good.”

Bishop was looking at Hicks somewhat quizzically, but her snort got just a glance from him. His personality subroutines didn’t seem to have quite the range needed to grasp something like this, and he seemed somewhat nonplussed. For some reason, that struck her as funny in and of itself.

Hicks nodded at Bishop to continue, and once again, Bishop’s eyes glanced across to her before he started talking. “I can still access the Sulaco’s computer, and based on the records maintained by the ship, I have matched the majority of the items removed, in part thanks to the radio frequency identity tags installed as standard and used for tracking items through the supply system. I cannot account for one journey. It could be an error, or a mistake on the part of the company. However, the ships internal logs indicate that a damaged access panel close to the main access dock was removed.”

She couldn’t quite follow what he meant. Listening to him explaining his search made sense, but what would anyone have been interested in the main access dock? “That’s the dock you dumped that alien out of.” Her head snapped around to stare at Dwayne, but he was still talking. “Bishop, which panel was removed? Which section was it in?”

Bishop’s voice was as calm and collected as ever. “The access panel was panel D17, located in frame DA. Frame D is the frame located eight point two meters behind…”

“Behind the main loading and retention stanchion for docked dropships. Son of a bitch.” Dwayne turned to look at her, hands already moving as he tried to sketch it out. “When Bishop docked the dropship, it was picked up by the automated telehandler, right? You’d have felt it as the dropship rose through the main airlock, and the magnetic clamps locked on. It would’ve carried you backwards, swinging the ship into the loading cradle, so the rear ramp would drop down to the deck level.”

She nodded; she could remember that clearly, remember feeling hyperalert to every sensation as her nerves tried to unscramble themselves from the journey up, from the run out of the hive, the relief of finding Newt alive. “We were standing on the deck. You were still strapped in your seat, and Newt and I were talking to Bishop, and then… it was coming out from under the ship. I remember, the legs of the ship… the dropship… they were on the deck and the clamps were on the top.”

“Do you remember from where under the ship it appeared? It can’t have come out of the main hatch…”

She’d been so focussed on it. Bishop had been choking, his torn body dropping to the deck like some kind of broken doll, and it was looking at Newt, and she had to keep its attention on her, and… “It was the right-hand side. And…”

She could see it. It was standing there, unfolding itself like a hellish insect from… “It was inside the clamping mechanism. It’d folded itself up, and it was stepping down, and it was on the right-hand side…”

“Frame E3.” Bishop was still so calm. How could he still be so calm? “Immediately adjacent to Frame D7.”

“Fuck.” No. That sounded too weak. “Fuck!” She was shouting, and she was out of her chair, and Bishop was staring at her, and Hicks – Dwayne – was on his feet, moving towards her, and all she could hear was that creature hissing in her ears again and how had she not checked? How had she been so stupid as to not check? She’d put Hicks in the cryotube, and packed Bishop as best she could, and she’d reassured Newt so much, and she hadn’t checked. She promised no more monsters, and she hadn’t checked, and…

She was struggling against something warm, and she realised that Hicks – Dwayne – was either trying to hold her or trying to stop her flailing around, but he was talking in her ear, saying something over and over, and Bishop was just watching them as if trying to work out what was going on. He was talking in her ear, and she could feel his breath, but she was so angry, raging at herself, at her stupidity.

He hadn’t held her like this since she was trying to launch herself into an underground conduit infested with aliens, while she was raging and screaming with the need to get Newt back, and she’d been strong then, frenzied. She’d been in the med bay, and rested, and she was even stronger now, but he wasn’t going to let her go. “It wasn’t you. This isn’t your fault.” He kept repeating the phrases over and over, while she raged.

He’d seen others do the same. Hell, he’d wanted to do the same himself before, but something inside him wouldn’t let him, wouldn’t let him let go that much, even when he wanted to. She needed to rage, needed to work through it, but he couldn’t let her hurt herself.

After a few seconds, she calmed. He wasn’t sure if it was because of anything he’d said, but she’d calmed at least a little. “We have to find it.” She twisted, looking over her shoulder at him. “Whatever it is, we have to find it, and kill it. It can’t happen again. I won’t let it happen again!”

He nodded, still holding her, feeling the shift as both her feet settled on the ground, even though she leaned against him. “Right.” They’d killed everyone else in his squad, and nearly the both of them too. She wanted to kill whatever the company had taken off the Sulaco? He’d hand her the damn flamethrower himself.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Colonel Macon, the officer commanding the space station, had agreed to see her. She didn’t need Dwayne to tell her that was unusual – with hundreds of military personnel on the station, it was unlikely that many outside of section heads would see the Colonel during the course of an average week, and yet that same Colonel was going to see her and Dwayne both, at the same time. The relative ease with which they’d managed to sure an appointment after only a thirty-six hour wait made her suspicious. Unless the military had some unusual customs she wasn’t aware of, that seemed pretty unlikely. Dwayne certainly seemed to think so, which didn’t help. Bishop didn’t have any more information on the Colonel than they did – a short, official bio, hosted on the station’s intranet site.

When the chime indicated that they should enter the Colonel’s office, the guard posted outside nodded to them and triggered the hatch release; Dwayne went in first, moving to a position somewhere on the left and snapping to attention, right arm raised in a salute, and announced himself; she walked in and moved automatically to Dwayne’s right, drawing up parallel to him, and fixed her attention on the figure behind the desk.

The Colonel had stood before the hatch opened, and to Ellen’s surprise, looked a little shorter in person than she had expected. Nevertheless, when the Colonel snapped a sharp salute back to Dwayne, the move evoked a certain intensity in motion.

“At ease, Corporal Hicks. Ms Ripley, please take a seat.” The Colonel gestured at the seats in front of her, motioning both of them to use them. She looked down at the both of them from a standing position, for a few seconds. “I’m Colonel Macon. You requested to see me, and I’m not sure I believe a word of your message, but I know that you went out on a mission with twelve marines and returned with one injured marine, half a synthetic and a child. The logs from your ship are incomplete, and Corporal Hicks’ debriefings read like a bad horror movie cliché.”

Macon moved back into her seat, sitting down and leaning her elbows on the desk, hands clasped together. “I’ve also got a dozen requests from the senior Weyland-Yutani representative on the station requesting to interview you, Ms Ripley, and I note that you both felt that you had the authority to walk into a secure area, harass two of my personnel, and abscond with the damaged synthetic, who’s currently ensconced in your quarters with a charging unit you also saw fit to remove without any authority. Perhaps you’d like to explain?”

While Macon’s tone and phrasing was polite, everything about her seemed to emanate a kind of tightly-controlled energy, from the knotted braid running down from the back of her head to the intense glare of her eyes. Her voice – influenced by a kind of soft drawl that Ripley associated with parts of the southern United States on Earth – was softer than her words seemed to imply, and Ellen couldn’t help shifting in her seat a little before answering. 

“What I wrote in my message is accurate, Colonel. LV-426 was the location of a hostile alien species, an incredibly dangerous and hostile species, and Weyland-Yutani are responsible for introducing that species to the colony there. The colony itself was destroyed as a result of damage taken during the investigation by Corporal Hicks and the rest of his squad, but not before the Weyland-Yutani representative on the mission attempted to use me and Newt… Rebecca… as hosts for the parasite stage of the alien species, in an attempt to smuggle specimens back to Earth.” She was determined to be calm, at least for now. The Colonel could be a big help if she believed her, and she trusted Dwayne to have been honest in his interrogations – debriefings, or whatever the Colonel wanted to call them.

Macon’s eyes moved to pin Hicks in his chair. “Your verbal reports have been very detailed, Corporal. And they largely support the claims made by Ms Ripley here, although you highlight some questionable decisions made by yourself and by others in your chain of command.” Hicks stared back evenly. To her eyes, he almost looked relaxed… but then he’d been able to sleep in a descending dropship. “I know that the footage recovered from your unit bodycams is incomplete, making it difficult to make any informed opinion on the complete chronology of events and the decisions made, but that’s not for me to review. I have no doubt that a board of review will be convened when you return to your official deployment station.”

“Yes sir.” She expected him to say more, but he didn’t. Instead, he simply waited. For some reason, Macon seemed to approve.

“You have both alleged that there is a clear security threat to this installation, created by Weyland-Yutani personnel removing a dangerous object of some kind from the Sulaco, and storing it somewhere aboard my station. By way of evidence, you have some speculative information on journeys made using loading trolleys. As fascinated as I am by the idea that you can gain valuable intelligence by tracking where consignments of boots and socks are going, you have no clear evidence, unless there’s more that you can tell me.” Macon settled back in her chair, her arms resting in a relaxed fashion on the arms of her chair.

Ellen could feel her temper rising. She had to make Macon see the risk they were under. 

Before she could speak, Dwayne leaned forward, catching Macon’s attention. “Sir, Ms Ripley tried repeatedly to inform my squad about the threat posed. Our experience suggested that she was overreacting, and none of us – not Lieutenant Gorman, not Sergeant Apone, not even me, took her seriously enough. We didn’t just get our asses handed to us. We got slaughtered. She said that one – just one – of these things took apart her entire crew in less than twenty-four hours, and I believe her. They’re smart as hell, and tough. They know at least basic tactics, they’re covered in armour plate, and if you kill one, they’ll burn through three decks worth of steel plate.”

Macon was watching him intently. When he paused, she didn’t interrupt, and after a couple of seconds, he carried on. “I read the colony logs. So did Bishop. The colonists were screwed at every stage. They didn’t have our training, or our weapons, but they did their best to fight them off, and then they started killing themselves and their children rather than being taken alive. The last log was dated four days after the first report; it showed that it took less than a day for the first of the big aliens to start appearing, and after that, they knew they were done within the next two days. There were fewer people there than there are here, and the aliens took them for breeding stock. All they did was breed, and kill, and breed more of themselves.”

Ellen saw Macon’s right forefinger tap against her armrest several times; from the way the Colonel was staring at Dwayne, maybe she wasn’t even aware she was doing it, but maybe it was a sign that they were getting through to her. They had to try. “Carter Burke saw these creatures, and he didn’t see a threat. Even when Apone and the others were dead, all he saw was a chance to make money. To turn them into Weyland-Yutani bioweapons. He nearly got the last of us killed because of it.”

“One executive does not a company make, Ms Ripley.” Macon sounded curt, and when Ellen went to speak again, she raised her hand, forestalling her. “If the reports are accurate, Carter Burke was actively responsible for the failure of the mission and a number of deaths, but I’m not a civilian court, and I can’t violate the civil rights of the Weyland-Yutani personnel on this station, or of the company. We’re still governed by civilian law here, short of there being a military emergency.”

“Have you asked them what they took off the ship? Have you done an audit? They’re on your station.” Raised hand or not, Colonel or not, she was going to make Macon understand. “You can’t just sit there and not do anything. Not with a risk like this. If the colony had died of smallpox or the damn plague, you’d have us all living in tents on antibiotic IVs, and you wouldn’t let Weyland-Yutani say you’re not allowed to do that.”

Macon snorted. “Smallpox and the plague are identifiable, verifiable diseases, and we’d know in hours if you’d brought those on board the station. I believe those aliens you encountered exist; the surviving footage, poor as it is, shows that. I also believe that you took actions which led to a massive thermonuclear detonation that turned them into so much alien toast, and my investigative team found nothing more in the Sulaco’s cargo bay than some possibly-alien snot. Which is in quarantine, Ms Ripley.”

There was a certain grim finality to Macon’s words, and Ellen could see Dwayne shifting in the corner of her eye, but that wasn’t going to stop her; she hadn’t been able to save her crew, and she hadn’t made Gorman listen when it was most important, but she wasn’t going to let that happen again. “Colonel Macon, you have to destroy whatever it is they took! Look at what the aliens did! Do you want that happening here? Or on Earth?!”

“Sit down, Ms Ripley. Or I’ll have you removed by the guard.”

Ellen didn’t even realise she was on her feet, but she definitely was – and almost ready to pull Macon out of the chair. She felt like she was made of wire and electricity, and she wanted to lash out at the Colonel, peering up at her. It was worse than the Nostromo hearings, worse than trying to talk to Vasquez and the others. It was…

For a moment – just a moment – she glanced at Dwayne, and all she could see on his face was worry. For her.

He should be backing her up. He should be doing something. He should…

She couldn’t stop shaking. For some reason, she couldn’t stop shaking. She dropped back into her chair, not because she wanted to, but because her legs didn’t seem to be able to hold her up.

Macon nodded at her, like an approving parent of some kind, but she didn’t order the guard into the room. Instead, she leaned forward, back into the same position she’d been in when she first started talking. “Ms Ripley, it’s my judgement as a military officer who’s seen some very unpleasant things that you’re bordering on becoming a headcase from post-traumatic stress. I’ve seen it turn people into complete wrecks, and in the space of a few months, you’ve been through two horrendous experiences. I think you need to ask yourself whether or not you’re in control of your actions.”

At Macon’s words, Ellen wanted to lash out at her – whatever she was feeling, it didn’t matter, compared to the need to get her to cooperate, to get her to take this seriously. Macon was staring at her, though… almost as if she was challenging her. Or perhaps just waiting to see how she’d react, see if she’d confirm everything Macon was saying. So, Ellen stared right back.

“The Weyland-Yutani people are determined to question you. At this point in time, I find that I am disinclined to acquiesce to their request. That means they can go whistle. They don’t get to say you’re an independent contractor they aren’t accountable for in one breath, and then spend the next telling me that I have no right to prevent them from questioning you about events on that planet. Unless you’re about to tell me that you’re keen and eager to meet with them, and not because you think you can bluff your way into their area in pursuit of… whatever you claim was taken from the Sulaco.”

That thought had occurred to her, but she’d originally dismissed it because she couldn’t see any way that they’d let her roam around their space unescorted.

Now, she was considering it again. Dwayne would help.

“Corporal Hicks.” Macon’s gaze swung across to him. “You are not in my direct chain of command. You’ve cooperated at every stage, and the details from the Sulaco on your service record indicate that you’re a solid, reliable marine. I don’t know whether what you’ve described actually happened or not, but if…” She paused, looking at him.

Ellen didn’t know how he could look so calm. Why wasn’t he as angry as her?

The fingers of Macon’s right hand drummed a staccato beat on the desk, once, twice, three times, before she spoke again, as if debating whether to go through with her original line of thought. “As serving military, you’re not subject to any obligation to discuss anything with representatives from Weyland-Yutani. I could order you to do so, but I am disinclined to indulge any such requests, should the company decide to try and make them. You’re not under my direct command, as your squad isn’t… wasn’t… assigned to this station. Until I receive deployment orders for you from your command HQ, my intention is that you should continue to receive care here. Any such orders will most likely be accompanied by a replacement crew for the Sulaco, so that she can be returned to active duty, although you should be aware as the senior rank remaining from your squad that I’ve been instructed to begin any repairs necessary, and in accordance with standing orders I will be ordering the removal of any hazardous items and munitions from the Sulaco. It would be of some assistance if you could confirm that the inventory log recorded prior to your drop on LV-426 was accurate.”

Dwyane barely hesitated before responding with a brief “Yes sir.” He didn’t salute, but Ellen wasn’t sure if he was expected to or not. If he was, Macon didn’t mention it.

“If, at any point, you once again feel inclined to tell any more of the marines under my command to proceed to a dark corner and fornicate with themselves while you remove equipment, you and I will fall out in spectacular fashion, and I’ll make sure to find plenty of things to keep you busy, none of which will be pleasant. Are we clear?” Given the curtness of her words, Macon didn’t seem particularly annoyed.

Ellen found her eyes flicking back and forth between Dwayne and the Colonel, trying to work out what she was seeing – or what she was missing. She barely heard Dwayne’s acknowledgement.

“Good.” Macon stood, and clearly that was intended to be some kind of sign the meeting was over, because Dwayne scrambled quickly to his feet. “As for the synthetic, Weyland-Yutani declared him surplus to requirement and submitted a request to have him dismantled and the salvageable components loaded back into the inventory system. I find that I am disinclined to acquiesce to that request either, as I don’t feel it appropriate for the technical staff on this station, who are about to spend the next few days surveying, servicing and repairing the Sulaco, to spend their time saving Weyland-Yutani the cost of doing the recycling themselves. As far as I’m concerned, the synthetic is a part of the Sulaco’s inventory, and that makes you responsible for it.”

Ellen had the distinct feeling that she was being railroaded out of this office. Dwayne didn’t seem like he wanted to argue, though.

Did she trust him?

She was looking at him, she realised. She sensed that Macon was looking at her, but she couldn’t take her eyes off Dwayne. And he was looking back.

“You’re dismissed. That means you can go, Ms Ripley.”

She heard Macon’s words, but only faintly, drowned out by the sound of her own breathing. Hicks nodded, ever so slightly, and she responded by rising without even glancing at the Colonel, walking out of the room.

~*~*~*~*~*~

They hadn’t spoken on the way back to the quarter. For some reason, everyone they’d met had moved out of the way as they walked down the corridors side by side, some of them watching as they walked by.

Back in his quarter, he’d gone straight to the counter with the coffee machine in the corner, and set it working. She watched his back as he worked; he’d taken the sling off as they walked back, leaving just the bandage sleeve.

When he was done, he turned around, a steaming mug in each hand. He handed one to her, soundlessly. She stared at him, eyes narrowed, but took it after a few seconds.

“I saw how you reacted to what she said. About PTSD.” The mug in her hand suddenly felt like too much weight, but she refused to put it down, staring at him. “She’s probably right. And I bet that gives us something else in common, because after what we went through on that planet, if we haven’t both got PTSD, it’s because we’re both dead already. And I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel dead yet.”

“She thinks my judgement’s shot.” She didn’t realise the question had been on her mind until she said the words out loud, but now the question mattered. And his answer.

Dwayne’s voice was clear and steady. “She probably does. But I also think she’s half-convinced by you. And I know you’re right. So, I’ve got your back, for what it’s worth.”

She looked away, bending to put her coffee down on the small table near Bishop and the other chair. “So, we find whatever they took and destroy it.”

He nodded. “We do. And…”

His voice trailed off, making her look up at him; she noticed that Bishop, who hadn’t said a word, had moved to look at him as well. She thought Dwayne had been looking at her before, but now, his gaze was somewhere else… somewhere a thousand yards away. Something just below his left eye twitched a little, but he didn’t show any sign of having noticed.

She said his name, and he didn’t respond; when she reached out to touch his arm, he jerked, sloshing coffee out of his mug. He didn’t seem to notice though, blurting out the words “Why didn’t she order us not to?”

“Not to? It sounded to me like she wasn’t keen on us doing anything other than sitting here, and maybe being grateful that I’m not being handed over to someone from Weyland-Yutani for a few days of questions and some bright lights.”

He shook his head. “She runs this base. She outranks everyone here. She could’ve ordered us to stay away from them. She could’ve had me confined to quarters. She could’ve demanded Bishop back, and put me on charges. She didn’t do any of that.”

“Maybe she thought you were being led astray by me, the insane drama queen.” She regretted the words as soon as she said them; they weren’t her, and she refused to be that person. Hicks couldn’t read her mind, though; he stepped forward, stopping inches short of her.

When she glared at him, he stared straight back. There were times she forgot that they were so close together in terms of height, but it was impossible to miss, standing this close to him. In the relative cool of the room – that same, faintly damp chill every station seemed to share – he was warm, and she could feel that across the intervening space, almost as if that warmth were rolling off him in waves.

“Am I leading you astray?” Her voice was quieter. 

He was still looking at her. Whatever else he was – they were – he didn’t blink or look away. “I’m the big bad marine, remember?” He leaned just a little bit closer. “You decided which way we were running. I opened the doors. I cut them open, if I had to. Not because you were leading me around, but because you made sense. And because I know when to listen, and when to follow, and when to shoot.”

His eyes were a brilliant green. Had she stopped to notice that before? Most people shied away when you looked them straight in the eyes. But Dwayne…

“I would like to help as well, if I can.”

Right at that moment, irrational or not, post-traumatic stress or not, alien lifeform aboard or not, she could’ve shot Bishop for interrupting.

~*~*~*~*~*~

The station was full of trained marines and other military personnel. Walking around it with weapons was a good way to get stopped, interrogated, or shot. Maybe all at the same time. They also couldn’t simply cut their way into the Weyland-Yutani space and then rampage around; not only did the company have its own security staff there, not only would it risk the safety of civilians, but it might slow them down. They couldn’t afford to get slowed down, particularly as they didn’t know what exactly they were looking for. Or where exactly it was.

It was Hicks who had gone to the Sulaco, although Ellen had gone as far as the station-side docking bay. He had not only the clearance to be aboard the ship in the first place, but he had a legitimate reason to be there. She’d suggested that they look to get equipment from the Sulaco, and he was the one who’d remembered Macon’s comments about inventory… and it was Bishop who’d queried the systems aboard the Sulaco’s remaining dropship, confirming that no-one had accessed the ship since she’d closed the hatches after manoeuvring him off the ship and into his cryopod.

Macon’s personnel had inventoried the Sulaco, and moved the munitions into the station armoury… but they hadn’t touched the inventory on the Dropship, because according to the Sulaco’s computer, the inventory had already been deployed, and removed from the main inventory account… and there wasn’t a post-mission report confirming how many munitions had been consumed and how many weapons lost during the operation on LV-426.

Hicks was right. You had to love the modern military accountant’s attachment to paper records.

Although he didn’t describe where he’d taken everything from in any detail, she had to wonder; were the supplies she had picked out but not taken still on the console near the camera screens? Bishop hadn’t had the time to secure it before having to leave the platform as the colony started collapsing, and they’d made a sharp climb into orbit with live ammunition rolling around loose – something that could’ve resulted in grenades being activated, pyrotechnics discharged – and it would’ve felt like an irony to escape the planet only to die because of an unsecured munition.

No, not an irony. It would just have pissed her off.

Sitting around the table, he laid out what he’d brought with him. No sentry guns this time, or flame units, or pulse rifles. He’d not even bought any pistols. “If we’re close enough that we need pistols, we’re already dead by the time we get through its skin,” was his only comment. She would have liked having one anyway – and liked a pulse rifle more – but she’d maybe feel like that every day of the rest of her life. However long that was.

He’d brought a motion scanner, reassuringly solid and heavy around the handgrip; if it could pick up a hamster in its cage, it could pick up an alien… or anyone else moving around while they were. He’d also bought one of the hand unit welding torches, because apparently no-one should leave home without one. 

Two of the cameras she recognised were also among the bag of items he’d brought; he’d wanted to bring a complete set of armour with him, but there was no subtle way to extract it from the Dropship, and all of the station personnel would keep their armour in lockers in the secure areas when off-duty. He’d brought two helmets though, to go with the cameras when they were ready, and a couple of right-angle flashlights, the kind designed to be strapped to chest armour – or carried in a pocket.

And then there were the things that went bang. He’d bought two strips of mini-flares, the kind she’d left herself as markers when looking for Newt. “They give off a lot of light, they’re easy to carry, and they burn hot enough to really offend anyone or anything you decide to shove them into,” had been his explanation.

And then there were grenades. Four of the explosive ones each. “If we have to use these, make sure you really, really need to. There’s a good chance we’ll blow a hole in the hull, and die. If we don’t, you can bet we’ll both be in prison, assuming Macon doesn’t just have us shot and our bodies thrown out an airlock.”

And then there were the smoke grenades. They looked like the grenades she knew, because they were also intended for use in the underslung launchers of the pulse rifles, but the banding on them was blue, not red. These, he handled every bit as carefully as the explosive ones – if not more so. “Did you know that military smoke grenades are actually pretty terrible at making smoke?” he’d asked.

When she’d shaken her head, he’d tapped one gently, where it sat on the table. “They use white phosphorus to make the smoke. Only white phosphorus doesn’t make a lot of smoke – and it’s kind of white and wispy. The white phosphorus itself… that burns like a son of a bitch. Hot as hell… it’ll burn right through you. I’m not sure if we’d be able to hit one of them with one, because they’re so fast, but… if we need to set something on fire, this’ll do it.”

And that left the planning. 

They knew where the Weyland-Yutani areas were, but they didn’t know where whatever had been taken was being stored. Bishop had pulled up floorplans as registered in the main station computer, but while they wouldn’t have been able to move structural walls, they could have restructured the soft areas internally in any number of formations. There were places that Bishop felt were likely to still be workshops, and bays for storing vehicles, all used as part of the company’s support and maintenance contract for the station. That knocked out a chunk of space. There had to be sleeping quarters as well, and some kind of mess – although Hicks had mentioned that while the military personnel had distinct messing areas, the civilian workers on the station and the company staff might be sharing some of the main station facilities.

“How big could it be? If it was a live alien… it’d be loose by now, surely?” She didn’t want to think of a live alien in this station. Too many places for it to go, too many places for it to hide, too many people it could kill and use as hosts.

Hicks looked at the map Bishop had sketched, showing the different levels, and the access points. “It can’t be that big. I mean, it couldn’t be another one of the big aliens. There’s no way two of them could’ve hidden on the way up, and you said you only saw one in the nest, right?”

“Right.” She thought she’d killed that one down in the hive, but it must’ve survived… unless there’d been two? But that didn’t make sense. How would it have known to come after her? It was smart enough to communicate with the others, and clever enough to hide. “If it was one of the smaller ones, I think… I think it would’ve come after us when I was fighting the big one. I’d never have been able to fight two at once, and the big one… she could control the small ones. I saw her make them back off.”

“The initial parasitic stage of the lifeform appears to be hardy, but doesn’t live for long after implanting it’s host. The records I retrieved from the labs at Hadleys Hope contained details on the efforts made by the colony doctor to remove them; he lost several samples through not putting them in stasis tubes quickly enough. If one had been brought on board the Sulaco, I think that one of us would already have been impregnated while we were asleep.” She sometimes hated Bishop’s perpetual calm, but now, it actually seemed to be helping her. Bishop and Dwayne both seemed… level. Steady. As if settling on a plan of action – or at least, on a plan for a plan of action – had somehow managed to help them be calm. She couldn’t feel that herself.

Bishop reflexively brushed loose strands of hair back from his high forehead, and for a moment, she was struck by the incongruity of the action; the complete absence of his legs seemed to cause him no concerns, but the artificial hair on his head prompted an unconscious response. Or was it a conscious response, intended to make him look more human? “You said that the alien nest had eggs in it. I believe it most likely that either the alien brought something aboard the Dropship that we haven’t seen yet, or it brought an egg with it. An egg would fit with a need to continue to propagate its species, which seems to be a basic imperative for each of the creatures you’ve encountered so far.”

“An egg would make them more confident.” She didn’t even try to keep the bitterness out of her voice. She knew she didn’t have to around the two of them. They were her people now. “They’d think of it like… a gift-wrapped present. A nice, portable, easy to control package. Until it opens.” She could see Burke’s face as she spoke. That aw-shucks clean-cut expression, that he’d kept on his face even when he was planning to make her and Newt human incubators. And she didn’t think that he was some deviation from the human norm – he was just another corporate middleman working his way up through Weyland-Yutani. “If it is one of the parasites… it could already be in someone, and they could be in a cryotube, waiting to be shipped home.”

“And they could already have gone.” Dwayne was right. 

“They didn’t wake Newt up. They sent her off to relatives still in her tube, according to the nursing staff. Or maybe they did wake Newt up, and she’s got one of those things inside her, and…” She couldn’t finish the thought. She wouldn’t finish the thought.

Hicks’ voice cut through the chain of thoughts running through her mind. “Then we’ll be following Newt wherever she is, and getting it out of her, and killing everyone involved.” On the Sulaco he’d been relaxed, wryly amused by everything. There was none of that amusement here. He looked as clear and focused as she’d ever seen him – moreso than at any point since she’d woken up. He looked like someone who trained to kill people for a living.

He put the last of the grenades on the table, two neat little lines placed in the middle of the available space. “We go in, we find what they took, we destroy it and we get out alive. That’s the first part. Better yet, we don’t get caught, so that when we go after Newt, they’ve got no reason to try and stop us travelling. Right?”

She nodded. Right. Then she nodded again, picking up one of the camouflaged rucksacks and pulling the zip open. “We know how big the area is that we’ve got to search, thanks to you, Bishop. We’ve got some ideas what we’re looking for. We’ve got… we’ve got the tools we need.”

“Every big problem is a collection of small problems acting with malicious intent. Apone told me that once. So, we make this a collection of smaller problems. Anything you want to say at this point, Bishop?” Hicks was gently tugging at the bandage on his face as he spoke. He’d said before going to the Sulaco that fading burns made him less memorable than walking around with a big white sign on his face, but that didn’t stop her from wincing slightly as she saw him teasing the adhesive away from his jawline, where the stubble was long enough that it had to hurt.

Bishop had been helpful enough with giving them information on the station layout, although there wasn’t much more that he had than they could’ve obtained from the general information network. He’d been largely silent since Dwayne got back though, and that worried her. “I’m afraid that my ability to help is limited. You already know about the directives that control my behaviour towards humans. I also have protocols associated with obeying the law – civil, corporate and military – and with taking actions that could harm the company that employs me. I have been reconciling my assistance because of the threat posed by the alien should it break loose, but… I cannot directly place anyone at risk. For example, even if it were theoretically possible for me to hack into the station systems, I wouldn’t be allowed to open the airlocks in a section with humans in, or in areas which might result in the loss of company property.”

“So is that what the alien is? Company property? If there’s one here, then it’s a danger to everyone aboard, and then everyone within range of this station who could ever come into contact with it once they’ve killed us all and used us to spawn more of their kind.” Getting angry helped her. It made her impulsive, but it burned the doubt out of her mind. Bishop should be one of them by now, irrational as she knew that to be.

Bishop spread his hands in a placatory gesture, his expression looking faintly pained – although she wasn’t sure that was something he was doing, or something she was projecting onto his face because she wanted to see it there. “If you find an alien, then my protocols will realign based on the change in circumstance in threat, but even then, I wouldn’t be able to cause the death of someone to facilitate your mission. The idea that I could cause the death of one person to save a thousand is unfortunately a preconception of fictional stories.”

She took of each of the grenades dropping them into the pockets of her jacket. Explosive on the right, smoke on the left. She saw Hicks glance at her pockets as she did so, but he didn’t say anything. With everything he’d said about weapon safety in Hadleys Hope, carrying grenades around loose had to be a sore point for him, but… smaller problems. “So, we get access to the Weyland-Yutani area. We find the alien, or the egg, or whatever else it is. Assuming it’s hostile, you can help us get rid of it somehow, but until then you can’t… override any cameras, or send false company orders, or… make their damn vending machines spray soda out randomly.”

Bishop didn’t get the chance to respond, because Dwayne was already talking. “Bishop, what’s the station standing order regarding fire, emergency and evacuation drills? Particularly the frequency of drills and tests?” As he was talking, the folded welding torch went into one pocket of his backpack; the motion detector was already in the main compartment; there was no way to walk around the station holding it without it being blatantly obvious, especially to everyone in the military they met.

Bishop paused, his eyes doing the thing they did that Ellen associated with accessing systems remotely. It would’ve made her more comfortable if he had to use some kind of handheld device or tablet to do it… but then it was hard to imagine anything making her comfortable again any time soon.

Her eyes flickered across to Dwayne’s face of their own volition. 

“The station has weekly tests of the alarm system on the second day of each week, between nine and ten in the morning on the local clock. There are fire drills every ten weeks on average, and evacuation drills every six months. The last fire drill was… seven weeks ago.” Bishops eyes were focussed again, looking at Hicks, who was nodding along. “The average response time is four minutes, twenty-six seconds. Colonel Macon issued a bulletin after the drill, advising that she expected the next drill to be conducted more quickly, and reminding all personnel – military and civilian – of the need to act in accordance with the training. Would you like to see a copy?”

She snorted.

Dwayne shot her another wry grin, one that tugged the left corner of his mouth up slightly, scars on his cheek and temple moving slightly with them. “In a fire drill, everyone will be moving to assigned shelter points, with hatches being manually sealed behind them by the zone control officer in each region. In an evacuation drill, the hatches stay open, but with protocols in place to have the synth… the artificial people expected to seal hatches closest to any breach, while the zone control officers marshal people at the pod and lifeboat entrances. Depending on the alarm, it’ll either be a scramble, or everyone will be jumping into environmental suits.” His smile got bigger. “I once spent six hours in an environmental suit because a certain Major wasn’t going to stop the drill until everyone was accounted for properly, and two people had gotten blitzed and were unconscious in their quarters.”

“Can you sound an alarm, Bishop?” Bishop’s face swung back around to face her, but she had a feeling she knew what he was going to say.

That placatory gesture was back. “Sounding a false alarm is a breach of local regulations, I’m afraid. If a drill should occur, I would be able to track personnel movements and confirm that areas were cleared or sealed as appropriate, as part of the station protocols on ensuring the safety of the crew.”

Dwayne had said that the Colonel was going easy on them. Would that translate into helping them? Even indirectly? Probably not. Why would someone risk their career, their livelihood… a prison sentence… to help people who’d been spouting gibberish about monsters in the night? 

Dwayne was looking at her again, and not just because his equipment was already packed, the gauze and bandages on his arm concealed by the sleeves of his jacket. “What do you say, Ellen? Shall I see if Colonel Macon’s committed to maintaining the currency of her staff’s safety training?”

“So… we sound the alarms, wait for them to leave, hope that they don’t leave anyone behind, and in four and a half minutes or less, search all of the available space, destroy whatever they found, and get out, without being seen, or blowing a hole in the hull?” It sounded ridiculous to her own ears. The kind of plan a madwoman would come up with.

She’d done crazier things. Some of them with him.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Colonel Macon had apparently been willing to consider it. Dwayne hadn’t said what he’d said to influence her, if anything could indeed influence her. Ellen trusted him. He trusted the Colonel. He couldn’t explain why, so she didn’t push him, but she’d waited for him in the dining hall two levels above the Weyland-Yutani area, his jacket and bag on the chair next to her while she ate rehydrated food and drank coffee that tasted something like battery acid that’d been strained through a cat before being served to people.

It was a public area, so no smoking, which meant that her fingers itched with the need to be doing something, and she had to keep reminding herself over and over not to put her hand in her pocket and start playing with the grenade in there. Instead, she’d borrowed one of the public tablets, and was watching one of the stored shows from the public access library. In common with everything else she’d ever seen in a station library, it must’ve been chosen for the low rental fee, rather than artistic merit. It didn’t help that her Spanish was very rusty, but she was pretty sure that the very traditional father was going to be upset when he found out that his independent, police detective daughter was far more interested in the pretty and competent female forensic scientist, than she was any of the local businessmen. Even the local bank manager. It was better than a book, though. She’d just have been staring at the same dozen words over and over.

Dwayne appeared silently to her right. Maybe he’d just been very quiet in what was quite a busy canteen, or maybe she’d just been distracted, but one second she was sure there was no-one there, and then the next…

He pulled the chair out and sat, the two of them taking up one corner of the table. “Depending on how today goes, I’ll tell you when to stop watching. You won’t want to, but trust me.” She must have looked bemused for a moment, because he reached past his lunch tray and tapped the top edge of the tablet. “I think the show was best when it was using the relationships for humorous effect.”

That was more intriguing than she expected. “When did you watch this?” She’d been watching on a complete whim – almost random choice.

He picked up a fork and started poking the food on his tray, as if testing to see which parts were still moving. “About four years after I finished training, I was assigned to a squad working out of the shipyard above Titan. I found out that while the military provides entertainment, a lot of it’s selected because it’s cheap, and this was one of the better choices. When you’re in a squad, you do what the squad does. They like drinking as a hobby, you go drinking. If they’re into boxing, you learn to box. My sergeant at the time was from the Nueva Castile colony, so… lots of shows in Spanish.”

She pushed her own tray away, having picked over everything that looked edible. “I forget sometimes that you didn’t have to spend as much time in cryosleep as I did. The companies never wanted anyone awake if it was cheaper to put them in cryo, and the last of the ships without the tubes went out decades before I started working on freight haulers.”

“Yeah.” The tablet continued to chatter away to itself, the voices little more than a single thread in the background noise. “When we’re sent out on active duty, it’s cryotubes until you get close to the target, but the rest of the time, you’re on a base. Lots of training, a fair number of exercises. Keep your qualifications sharp, drill with your squad, provide security for whatever installation you’re on.”

She wanted to know how things had gone with Macon. Wanted to know if they had any chance at all. She was the one who’d insisted on being somewhere public and visible though. “The transit stations were busy, but when I had leave… if I had leave… I spent it on Earth. It was only my third long-haul run. After Amanda was born, I wanted to stick to local runs, but I needed the money from a longer trip to keep us set up. It turns out that travel’s bad for your family.”

He ate in relative silence for perhaps a minute; he looked like one of those people who approached a meal by eating each food group separately. Was he waiting for her to keep talking?

After eating the mass of green beans, he looked up at her. “You can talk about her, if you want to. I can listen. Or I can talk about something else, if you want a distraction for the next twenty-three minutes. You should eat your pudding, though. You never know when you’ll next get a chance to eat.”

Twenty-three minutes. That was an oddly specific number. So, they were on. Unless Macon was lying to them. Or Dwayne was wrong. Or…

She pulled her tray back to her and started eating the dessert. Something vaguely chocolate-flavoured. “Maybe later. After all, we may have a lot more time to talk then.” She deliberately wasn’t thinking about later. After. It would either matter, or it wouldn’t.

“You make your squad your family, you know? I know that most people spend their entire lives on a colony, or on Earth, or maybe on a station, but your squad are the only people who live on the same time as you, for as long as you’re a part of that squad. They become your family. Even the stupid ones.” She snorted, thinking of several faces from the past. And the Sulaco.

The Nostromo had been a bit like that. “I did three short runs with Captain Dallas and his crew before… before the last one. Ash and me, we were the new ones. The others… they’d been shipping for longer. Parker and Brett, the engineers… they were inseparable. I think they’d been shipping together for twenty years. Parker would always be the one talking, and Brett… he’d just say ‘right’ occasionally. But Dallas trusted them to keep the ship ticking over, and they did.”

Eighteen minutes later, they left the canteen.

~*~*~*~*~*~

“Bishop’s best guess is that it’ll take at least a minute for the primary areas to clear out, even assuming that people respond promptly to the alarm, and don’t treat it like a drill. There’s also no clear information on how many artificial units there are who’ll stay behind whether it’s an evacuation or not.” Walking and talking, they were setting quite a pace as they moved towards the entrance they’d chosen.

She checked the grenades for the tenth time. Her flashlight was like his; one of those bent units designed to stand upright in a pocket or bandolier and illuminate everything in front of her, and she thumbed the light to test it… only for there to be no beam of light. “I don’t think the light’s working.”

He didn’t pause. “It was working when I checked it on the Sulaco. It’s set for infrared light at the moment. We normally use them with the eyepieces for night vision, but a handy side effect is that they screw with standard cameras. And the upgraded cameras automatically switch to infrared anyway during an emergency.”

He didn’t see her fleeting smile.

“We’re here.” It was an integral, shipboard-services-specific storage area. Or, put another way, it was an updated broom cupboard, probably full of cleaning supplies. It was also fifteen meters away from the access point. “If anyone tries to get in, pretend we’re in that tv show.”

He nodded as he undogged the hatch and pushed it open. “I hope that makes me the gay police detective. I think I’d be good at fighting crime in the countryside.”

“If you think I’m spending the rest of my life in a forensic examiner’s office, you’ve got another think coming.” There’d been more than enough dead people already for one lifetime.

The hatch settled back into place behind them, sealing in a space barely large enough for two long sets of racked shelves, with equipment held in cages, secured to stop it flying around if … she wasn’t sure what. Maybe if something hit the station, and people were taking shelter in cleaning cupboards.

He was fast; he was already swinging his helmet up onto his head, levering the chinstrap into place, as the hatch sealed itself. “I could do with a nap. It doesn’t feel right, going into battle awake.” While she tugged her own helmet into place, he closed and zipped his jacket, tapping the flashlight in the left-hand pocket.

Watching him was… distracting. He didn’t waste any motion, or make any unnecessary movements. It looked like he’d been practising how to hide in a storage locker before an illegal operation for years. “Do you know why Macon agreed?” 

He seemed to be content with his preparations; the scanner was in his left hand, muscles tensed along his forearm as he held it. “She didn’t agree, exactly. She doesn’t know what we’re planning, and if she did, she’d be obliged to stop us, or arrest us, or both. But… she prodded at me a while, questioned me on how you’re doing, and spent most of the time questioning me about my service record.”

She zipped her jacket up, while she thought about what he’d said. “Sounds like a good way to deny helping you out at all. Was she impressed with your service record?” There was nothing to do but wait, now. Hopefully.

“I’ve never seen anyone more impressed. Who’d have thought passing basic training in the upper third of my class would be so compelling to a senior officer.” That wry grin was back, twisting his mouth appealingly.

They were both mad. Certifiably insane. They had no chance of making what they were planning work, and it already felt too late to pull back.

He stepped forward, and pushed her back gently against the bulkhead, near the hatch. Leaning forward until his helmet was resting against hers, he was completely in her space. She could push him away, but instead, she let herself rest, just for a moment. The back of her helmet was braced against the bulkhead; the front was held in place by his. The world was suddenly a lot smaller.

“We’re going to do this.” His voice was soft. “We’re going to go in there, find what they took, and burn it, or blow it out an airlock, or something else. And then we’re going to walk out and find Newt. We did it once before. You did It once before.” For once, she wasn’t a mix of the slight chill of the station and the annoyance of being just a little too warm in her jacket. Here, in this space, she was… comfortable.

She hadn’t worked out what her reply was going to be when the alarms started ringing.

~*~*~*~*~*~

Getting out of the storage space had been harder than getting into the Weyland-Yutani area; the hatch had been undogged, and Hicks was walking quickly, the motion tracker held up in front of him. Somehow, he was managing to twist as he walked, swinging it to left and right, covering the arc in front of her. She was opening hatches as they went past, each time he nodded that it was clear. Three times, they’d had to scramble because of moving, human-sized shapes that were probably synthetics moving around. She hadn’t been sure, but he had been.

It helped that a third of the space was a large hanger, subdivided into storage and repair bays by twenty-foot storage containers secured to the deck some means. It was open space, and he’d boosted her up on top of one to look around the area.

It’d taken them two minutes to clear the main level, and three minutes for the next level down. That left the third level, and they were pushing faster than ever. None of the white gleaming spaces of Gateway station; this was bare steel and painted pipework and hazard markings on the edges of walkways. She had a knack for spotting the structural walls, which made it easier to navigate, but it felt like they were already out of time.

“It’s got to be here somewhere. This level isn’t that big, and we’re close to the main power core, so it should be easy to spot, but they’ve got all of these fucking walls up…” She could hear the urgency in her voice, the frustration that she wasn’t somehow better at this.

They swung around another corner, the motion tracker raising faint beeps as it continued to search. A quick glance showed her that the display was fuzzier than it had been, but before she could ask, Hicks murmured, “Crappy EMC shielding on the power core in this area is throwing out…”

He didn’t get to finish the comment, because she spotted another hatchway that hadn’t been on Bishop’s floorplan, one that lay on one edge of a sharp corner in the corridor. That wasn’t all that common; human beings loved symmetry, which meant that hatches tended to go in the middle of walls, not close to one edge, unless they were in pairs.

It was also the first locked door they’d come across; a panel above the locking bar was glowing a sullen red. That alone made it the best prospect they’d seen so far. They practically sprinted up to it, Hicks keeping a constant watch on the motion tracker. “Nothing moving around inside, from what I can tell.”

She looked away down the branch of the corridor they hadn’t searched yet, watching it curve back away. “This has to be it. Can you hack the lock?” She’d seen others doing that at Hadleys Hope, springing open doors. She’d also seen them cutting them open – or welding them shut.

He passed her the motion tracker, swinging his backpack down to his feet. “No. Not with what I have. I can try and cut it open, but it’ll take time.” He was already flipping up the small eyeshield on the hand-held welding torch. “It’ll take half a minute off, then maybe a minute more to get through the bar behind it – assuming this is just a single-bar door, and not one with recessed bolts around the frame.”

“Let’s hope it isn’t.” As she walked away up the unexplored corridor, trying to balance watching the tracker with looking with her own eyes, she heard the crackle of the welder starting up behind her. This had to be it. Please, let this be it.

Something moved on the motion tracker. It was right at the edge of the scanning range, and if it wasn’t for the low tone from the tracker, she might be second guessing that she’d seen something. It was there though, moving slowly. The tracker couldn’t decide exactly how far away it was – twenty-seven meters, maybe twenty-eight – but it was close enough to make her sweat. How far did the noise Hicks was making carry? The klaxons were still going for the drill, but that wasn’t a constant noise… it cycled in ululating waves.

Moving slowly at first, she paced back down the corridor to check back the way they’d entered; as she passed Hicks, she touched him gently on the shoulder. “Movement that way.” A quick toss of her head gave the direction.

The way they’d entered seemed to be clear, but when she went back past him, whatever was moving was closer – maybe twenty-four meters – and the corridor she was in bent away about fifteen meters away from where Hicks was kneeling, so they could be seconds away from being discovered. How long had he been cutting?

For what seemed like an eternity, she watched the blob on the tracker moving, before slowly heading up to the junction as quietly as she could. She couldn’t hear anything and, after waiting for a few seconds, she risked a glance down both sides of the T-junction.

There were hatches visible on both branches.

Pulling her head back, she checked the motion tracker again. Whatever it was, it to her left. That suggested that it was in a room, but it could be the same room they were cutting their way into.

As she turned to look back at Hicks, he snapped the eyescreen on the mini-welder down, nodding at her. Hurrying back, she kept the tracker pointing back towards whoever – or whatever – she’d detected. She saw his eyes move from her face, to the tracker, and back to her face. He knew.

“We could be about to burst into a room someone’s standing in. Or something.”

He nodded. “It can’t be one of those aliens. It’d be clawing its way through the wall to get us.” That wasn’t as reassuring a comment as it had perhaps been intended to be.

She pulled one of the grenades out of her right-hand pocket – the explosive kind. If it was an alien, and if it was waiting in there for them, she was going to kill it. She wasn’t going to let it take her alive. She’d already lived that nightmare enough times in her sleep.

He didn’t argue with her; instead, he just reached hold of the hatch handle, nudging it slightly to make sure it was going to turn freely. He paused, then leaned more closely towards her, hands still on the handle. “We find it. We burn it. We run like hell to the external hatch we passed about four hundred meters back, and we go out through the maintenance tunnel. It’ll be a bitch to crawl through, but we’re getting out of here. Right?”

She didn’t want to nod. That might weaken her resolve to see this through, make her start thinking about possibilities more than a few minutes away. Instead, she gripped the grenade more tightly, thumb resting on the detonator cap. “Open the hatch, Dwayne.”

He turned the handle and yanked, pulling the hatch open. From where she was standing, she could see some of the room through the widening entry, and it was cold. Visibly cold. The walls were caked with frost so thickly that they were the same colour as dirty snow, and she could see the squat shape of what had to be a refrigeration unit in the corner opposite the door.

She could also hear an alarm ringing. A new alarm.

Hicks was right behind her as she hopped through the hatch, breath misting in the air in front of them both. There were two more refrigeration units working away, and the room was so cold that it hurt to breathe; the inside of her nose began to sting frantically, painfully, and the air was like a blade in her lungs.

The room was mostly bare, and maybe four meters on each side. In the middle of the room, inside some kind of transparent tube, a familiar shape rested. It was standing on top of a polished metal cylinder – a small metal barrel of some kind, perhaps – within that transparent tube.

It was an egg. Just like the ones she’d seen in the hive or chamber or whatever the fuck it was at the heart of the alien nest, where the big alien – the queen – had been spawning them. Just like the one she’d seen in front of Newt, when she’d been pinned to the wall.

For a moment, fear washed through her – fear, and repulsion at the sheer otherness of what she was seeing. It didn’t look like something that should exist in the world, let alone be right in front of her. It was grotesque. And the top of the egg, where in the alien nest she’d seen leathery flaps peeling back, were four large, metal clamps. Each seemed to be set to hold one flap closed, pins or spikes at each end of each clamp piercing into the skin – the shell – of the egg.

And despite the low temperature, despite the clamps, she could feel it wanting to move. Wanting to open.

Hicks was already moving towards it, looking at the top of the unit.

“I think… it’s just resting on the floor. It’s not sealed at both ends.” He reached out to nudge the translucent cylinder, and when he pushed, she saw it move very slightly. She also heard him swear as the hand he pulled back left some skin on the tube.

She was already pulling more grenades out of her pockets. Three, then four in total. Looking at her, he dug into his left pocket, pulling out the two smoke grenades. “We’ve got to burn it.” She knew it. She’d seen them burning in the nest, so she knew they could burn. “We should use one of the other grenades as well, to make sure.”

He looked at her, eyes clear and intent. Then, without saying anything, he stripped his jacket off, wrapping it around both hands like an oversized pair of linked oven mitts. “We’re too close to the core. A grenade could damage the shielding, and if it does, we’re terrorists and we’re dead.”

Terrorists. That would be effectively a death warrant. On a military installation, they would shoot first and not bother with questions, and whatever vaguely charitable feelings Macon might be indulging towards them would vanish like a snowball in a blast furnace.

“We have to destroy it.” Would the tube contain any of the explosion? Would the phosphorous in the grenades be enough? Was it worth dying for?

Suddenly, she was digging into her shirt pocket, her fingers already numb from the cold. “Your small flares. Give them to me.” He frantically unravelled the jacket from around his left hand, digging into his own pocket. “Smoke grenades and flares. Lots of magnesium, lots of phosphorous. Will it be enough?”

He passed her the flares, wrapping his hand again as the cold air made his skin seem almost translucent, the pale gauze bandages looking like ivory by comparison. “It’s not a welding torch, but… they’ll burn hot, and for a couple of minutes.”

She was juggling flares and grenades, and she couldn’t feel her fingers. There were alarms going, and the odds of meeting someone as they ran for the access hatch were so high it was practically a certainty. And someone – probably a synthetic – was on the other side of the wall behind Hicks.

Not a welding torch. "Can your welder cut a hole in it?"

Even as she asked the question, she saw him tense with the effort of trying to lift the cylinder, jacket sliding on the smooth surface. As it toppled and crashed, the metal stand went with it, and the egg thudded to the floor and started rocking.

As Hicks started pulling his hands free of the jacket, she was digging into his backpack, looking for the welder. “We have to be sure.” If they weren’t sure, then this was all for nothing. It might prompt Macon to investigate what the company was doing aboard her station, but she was willing to bet that there were no records, and that Weyland-Yutani would scream bloody murder about theft and sabotage and call for her blood. And she didn’t care. She couldn’t care.

~*~*~*~*~*~

As they ran through the corridor, lungs screaming, the alarms felt like a physical force battering against her skin. All that mattered now was trying to reach the external hatch as quickly as possible. The backwash of heat from the first smoke grenade going up had been bad enough, and that one had been outside the egg; the one crudely shoved into the hole Hicks had burned would follow it in seconds. It might already have gone off, without her being able to hear it over everything else that happened. They might at any second run headfirst into a damage control party, a patrol, a Weyland-Yutani security detachment.

She wasn't trying to track the distance they'd covered, or the corners they'd turned; all that mattered was that they had to keep running together to the hatch.

And from the hatch, to Newt.

They had to be sure.


End file.
